Thursday, October 18, 2012

Green Party Candidates Arrested at Presidential Debate !

Green Party Candidates Arrested at Presidential Debate 16 Oct 2012 Green Party candidate Jill Stein and her vice presidential running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested at the Hofstra University debate site today as they protested their exclusion from the second presidential debate. Stein and Honkala were jailed for disorderly conduct around 3 p.m. when they were blocked by police officers as they attempted to enter the debate hall, according to Stein's campaign manager, Ben Manski. Manski said that it was unclear when they would be released, but they could remain jailed until midnight.

FBI agent poses as al-Qaeda facilitator, supplies man with 1,000-pound fake bomb, then indicts him 17 Oct 2012 A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said. The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said... An undercover FBI agent posed as an al-Qaeda facilitator, supplying him with 20 50-pound bags of what he thought were explosives to use in building his bomb. Nafis also visited the Lower Manhattan site multiple times as he planned the attack, officials said.

FBI thwarts New York Fed bomb plot [that they set in motion] 17 Oct 2012 A man was arrested Wednesday morning in downtown Manhattan for allegedly attempting to bomb the New York Federal Reserve Bank building, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday. Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, tried to "detonate what he believed to be a 1,000-pound bomb at the New York Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan’s financial district," according to a release from the office of Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. The suspect faces charges of "attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to provide material support to Al Qaeda."

Al-Qaeda bomb plot on New York: Suspect arrested over attempted attack on building near World Trade Centre site --Quazi Nafis used a mobile phone to try to set off a 1,000 bomb - not knowing the explosives he had been given [by the FBI] were duds 17 Oct 2012 Undercover FBI agents today foiled an al-Qaeda [al-CIAduh] bomb plot to blow up New York's Federal Reserve Bank. Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year-old Bangladeshi man, used a mobile phone to set off a 1,000 bomb not knowing the explosives he had been given were duds. Nafis was being held tonight on charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to provide material support to al-Qaeda, the US Department of Justice said in a statement.

Video Shows Drunk, Stoned Defense Contractors 17 Oct 2012 Cellphone video recorded earlier this year at an operations center of a U.S. defense contractor in Kabul, Afghanistan, appears to show key personnel staggeringly drunk or high on narcotics, in what former employees say was a pattern of outrageous behavior that put American lives at risk and went undetected by U.S. military officials who are supposed to oversee such contractors mercenaries. The video was provided to ABC News by two former employees. Questions posed by ABC News to the Pentagon have sparked a criminal investigation by the U.S. Army, a spokesman says.

CIA agent and U.S. soldier killed in Afghan suicide attacks 17 Oct 2012 A senior U.S. defense official says an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency was among those killed in a suicide bombing at an Afghan intelligence office -- the latest so-called "insider attack" in the war. The attack Saturday happened in a remote area of the Kandahar province and killed Ghulam Rasool, the deputy intelligence director for Kandahar Province, two of his bodyguards, and two U.S. intelligence officers. One of the Americans has been identified as a female solider -- Brittany B. Gordon, assigned to a military intelligence company from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. The second American killed was a CIA officer deployed in Afghanistan.

Feds win round in CIA leak case 17 Oct 2012 Prosecutors pursuing former CIA officer John Kiriakou for allegedly leaking the identities of two other CIA officers involved in interrogating terror suspects need not prove that Kiriakou intended to harm the United States or help a foreign nation, a federal judge ruled in an opinion made public Wednesday. The ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema is a defeat for Kiriakou's defense, which asked the judge to insist on the stronger level of proof—which likely would have been very difficult for the government to muster. In 2006, another federal judge in the same Northern Virginia courthouse, T.S. Ellis, imposed the higher requirement in a criminal case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Colorado shooting: D.A. to see alleged gunman's school records 17 Oct 2012 A judge in the case against James E. Holmes ruled Wednesday that most of the mass murder suspect's academic records, his campus police file and some communication with University of Colorado Denver professors can be given to the prosecution to show state of mind and possible motive. Holmes, 24, was considered a promising doctoral student in the university's elite neuroscience graduate program before he withdrew about six weeks before the July 20 Aurora theater massacre. Twelve people died and at least 58 were wounded when Holmes allegedly opened fire in a packed movie theater during a post-midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises." He faces 166 charges, including two first-degree murder charges for each person killed. [See: Aurora, Colorado Shooting 'Oddities' By Lori Price.]

Earthquake triggers 'unusual event' at Seabrook nuclear power plant 17 Oct 2012 The Seabrook nuclear power plant declared "an unusual event" at 7:20 p.m. Tuesday after an earthquake centered in Maine was felt in the control room of the New Hampshire facility, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In a statement, the NRC said the "unusual event" is the lowest of four levels of emergency classifications used by the NRC. "The declaration was prompted by on-site ground motion resulting from an earthquake centered near Hollis, Maine - about 50 miles from the plant," NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said in a statement.

Obama-Romney debate number two: Another stage-managed charade 17 Oct 2012 Both candidates ritualistically invoked the American "middle class," which has largely disappeared, as millions have been thrown into the ranks of a working class whose existence neither candidate acknowledged. They repeatedly declared their commitment to improving the lot of the "middle class," while concealing the plans being worked out between the Democrats and Republicans for after the election to drastically cut basic social programs upon which tens of millions of people depend...Hovering in the background was the catastrophic state of American society, which neither candidate seriously addressed. Romney mentioned the growth of poverty and continuation of mass unemployment only as talking points to use against the incumbent. Obama never acknowledged them.